The sunny day merged into a translucent evening as I drove through the Arizona desert, promising an ideal night for stargazing once the twilight faded from the sky. But the dusk glow, viewed in my rearview mirror, seemed interminable. In frustration, I pulled over, killed the car lights and stepped out to look behind. Instead of a twilight band of light stretching along the horizon, I saw a narrow cone of opalescent light reaching upwards.
From Aries, it stretched past the glistening Pleiades star cluster to the horns of Taurus the bull – along the zodiac, the path followed by the moon and planets in the sky. As an astronomer, I knew of this phenomenon; had even glimpsed it from the murky skies of the UK; but now in the American desert I was seeing in its full glory the fabled zodiacal light.
